Indignities in Breast Cancer

Indignities in Breast Cancer

If you are aware of the breast cancer culture that has built up in our society over the last
two decades, you might think that you are entering a world of fuzzy pink gauze, soft teddy
bears, and garlands of ribbons. Generally a land of sparkling brightness personified by
women who are happy and smiling while they are “battling” this disease, the “she-roes”
(rhymes with heroes), as Dr. Gayle Sulik has caustically described them. The writer
Barbara Ehrenreich calls this the “bright-siding” of the disease. In this narrative you would
be hard-pressed to find stories that were not about triumph over adversity and how breast
cancer has made someone a better person. For some, a cocoon of cotton candy somehow
cushions this ferocious disease, making it seem nonthreatening, just another part of life’s
passage, like puberty or marriage or childbirth.

Actually, there is not much in Cancerland that is pink or gauzy, and failing to recognize
that is one of the many indignities of breast cancer. There needs to be room to
acknowledge some of these indignities, so here is my attempt to do just that.

Even those of us who have not been diagnosed with breast cancer have, of course, been
exposed to the indignity of the mammogram. Plop your breast in between two plates that
exert their viselike grip on your boob, hold your breath, take a picture. Take a breath, turn
the machine, and do it again. Just a couple of different angles, won’t take long.

Then there is the prodding and probing in the biopsy. I wasn’t sure how this was
supposed to work. A needle biopsy sounded to me as if a needle would be inserted, like a
pipette, and a tissue sample would be drawn out from the mass. Actually, it felt and
sounded more like a staple gun, inserted multiple times into the lump to remove multiple
tissue samples. Try this at home. Staple some paper together using five or six staples, one
at a time, and as you do, imagine that happening in your breast. It was the sound that really
resonated with me. Ca-chunk. Ca-chunk. Ca-chunk.

For me one of the lasting indignities was the sheer extent to which my breasts were no
longer mine. A long succession of people manhandled (and womanhandled!) me. Each
professional was perfectly nice and well meaning and above all professional, but they were
focused on my breasts, not me, almost as if my breasts were not even part of me but rather
just objects in isolation that needed dealing with. Prior to this experience, the people who
had an up close and personal relationship with my breasts were my husband, my
gynecologist, and my breast-feeding children. Now I was being photographed, perused, and
palpated by a rotating cast of doctors, residents, and sundry other medical folks.

X-rays and MRIs—more people who need to work with your breasts. Lie down on your
stomach and let your breasts drop into this Plexiglas box. Don’t move while we slowly slide
your body through this tube.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the lymphoscintigraphy. Lie down while we inject this
nuclear radiotracer into your nipple and you can watch the dye travel to your lymph nodes
right here on this screen. Yes, we do need to do three separate injections into your nipple
area. This was a vital procedure, it would help my surgeon as she tried to find out whether
my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, but it did not make those shots in my nipple any
easier to endure.

After your mastectomy, drains will be hanging out of your breast wounds. The drain is
called a “grenade drain” because, yes, it looks like a grenade! A tube comes out of your
incision and empties fluids and blood into a suction bulb. Okay, I stand corrected, that fluid
that comes out of your wound? That’s kind of pinkish red, so here is the hint of pink. My
drain, which I had in for about two weeks after the surgery, was uncomfortable and
annoying. It can flop around if you don’t have it in place properly. So you spend a lot of
time organizing yourself so that it doesn’t catch on something and rip out. Yes, a small
thing in the grand scheme of things but … still.

And another thing, a nine-inch scar across my chest where my breast used to be (see “R
Is for Reconstruction”). Look, my plastic surgeon was really good and did incredibly
careful work. But a nine-inch scar is still a nine-inch scar that stares back at you if you look
in the mirror, like a gash across the landscape of your womanhood. I knew it was there, I
just didn’t look for the longest time because my relationship to the way I looked during
treatment was complicated to say the least (see “H Is for Hair” and “L Is for Looks” and
“M Is for Mastectomy”). And one thing I could not look at was the huge scar across my
chest. In fact, I didn’t look at it for months and months.

These were my indignities. Yours may be different. My point is breast cancer is many,
many things. What it is not is a fun ride. It is painful and debilitating and public, and it is
okay to feel indignant about that.